1 Let brotherly love be firmly established among you; 2 and do not forget to shew hospitality; in doing this, men have before now entertained angels unawares. 3 Remember those who are in prison, as if you were prisoners too; those who endure suffering, since you have mortal bodies of your own. 4 Marriage, in every way, must be held in honour, and the marriage-bed kept free from stain; over fornication and adultery, God will call us to account. 5 The love of money should not dwell in your thoughts; be content with what you have. God himself has told us, I will never forsake thee, never abandon thee;[1] 6 so that we can say with confidence, The Lord is my champion; I will not be afraid of what man can do to me.[2]

7 Do not forget those who have had charge of you, and preached God’s word to you; contemplate the happy issue of the life they lived, and imitate their faith.[3] 8 What Jesus Christ was yesterday, and is to-day, he remains for ever.[4] 9 Do not be carried aside from your course by a maze of new doctrines; what gives true strength to a man’s heart is gratitude, not observances in the matter of food, which never yet proved useful to those who followed them.[5] 10 We have an altar of our own, and it is not those who carry out the worship of the tabernacle that are qualified to eat its sacrifices. 11 When the high priest takes the blood of beasts with him into the sanctuary, as an offering for sin, the bodies of those beasts have to be burned, away from the camp; 12 and thus it was that Jesus, when he would sanctify the people through his own blood, suffered beyond the city gate. 13 Let us, too, go out to him away from the camp, bearing the ignominy he bore;[6] 14 we have an everlasting city, but not here; our goal is the city that is one day to be. 15 It is through him, then, that we must offer to God a continual sacrifice of praise, the tribute of lips that give thanks to his name. 16 Meanwhile, you must remember to do good to others and give alms; God takes pleasure in such sacrifice as this.

17 Obey those who have charge of you, and yield to their will; they are keeping unwearied watch over your souls, because they know they will have an account to give. Make it a grateful task for them: it is your own loss if they find it a laborious effort. 18 Pray for us; we trust we have a clear conscience, and the will to be honourable in all our dealings. 19 And I make this request the more earnestly, in the hope of being restored to you the sooner. 20 May God, the author of peace, who has raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, that great shepherd, whose flock was bought with the blood of an eternal covenant,[7] 21 grant you every capacity for good, to do his will. May he carry out in you the design he sees best, through Jesus Christ, to whom glory belongs throughout all ages, Amen.[8] 22 I entreat you, brethren, bear patiently with all these words of warning; it is but a brief letter I am sending you.[9] 23 You must know that our brother Timothy has been set at liberty; if he comes soon, I will bring him with me when I visit you. 24 Greet all those who are in authority, and all the saints. The brethren from Italy send you their greetings.[10] 25 Grace be with you all, Amen.

[3] ‘The happy issue of the life they lived’; literally, ‘the out-going of their behaviour’. This is usually understood of their deaths (cf. Wis. 2.17); but it seems more likely that the Apostle refers to the results (cf. I Cor. 10.13) of the holy life lived by the earliest Christian missionaries, in the establishment of the faith.

[4] This verse seems to point forward to what follows; since the Christ we worship is the same in every age, there can be no room for new doctrines in the Church.

[5] ‘What gives true strength to a man’s heart is gratitude, not observances in the matter of food’; literally, ‘it is good that the heart should be made firm with thankfulness (or, with grace), not with foods’. There is perhaps a reference to Ps. 103.15. Some commentators would understand the ‘foods’ in question to be the sacrificial meat eaten by the worshipper under the old Covenant.

[6] vv. 10-13: These reflections are doubtless meant to console the Jewish Christians, in case any of them should regret being cut off from their ancestral worship. The ‘altar’ is understood by some commentators of the Holy Sacrifice, by others of the Cross, by others of Christ himself.

[7] ‘That great shepherd, whose flock was bought with the blood of the eternal covenant’; literally, ‘that great shepherd of the flock in the blood of the eternal covenant’. According to some, these last seven words should be taken with the main verb, ‘raised from the dead’.

[8] Here, as in I Pet. 4.11, it is not clear whether ‘to whom’ refers to ‘God’ or to ‘Christ’.

[9] It is difficult to believe that the Apostle refers to the whole of these thirteen chapters as a short letter. Perhaps we should understand that he is referring only to the immediate context, verses 18 to 25, as his ‘letter’ (in the sense that these alone bring a personal message from him), and distinguishing it from the lengthy ‘words of warning’, which have had to be read with patience.

[10] ‘The brethren from Italy’, as an English phrase, would suggest that the Apostle was not writing from Rome. But he may well have been writing from Rome, since the same words, according to classical usage, might mean ‘the brethren in Italy send their greetings from there’.